The Representation of Soil in the Western Art: From Genesis to Pedogenesis

Different people attach different significance to soil. Certainly this is the case for farmers as compared to typical city dwellers, and of course, for soil scientists compared to most other scientists and non-scientists. Consequently, the meanings and uses of the term soil are numerous. For the purpose of this chapter, soil when written with a lowercase letter, will be referred to the surface of the landscape. Soil, when capitalised, will refer to the Earth’s surface layer—the pedological object—that if exposed in a vertical cut constitutes a pedological profile; a portion of that surface layer may include rock. A very large vocabulary is used for different Soils of the world and varies with the classifications. In this text the word “Lithosols” (French classification, Duchaufour 1982) is quoted, it refers to young Soils, mainly constituted from rocks debris by physical and chemical weathering of the initial rock; they are called Leptosols in the IUSS-WRB classification (1998).